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| The Mystery within |
It’s harvest time and a time to be grateful. But I also feel overwhelmed this time
of the year with the bounty of fresh produce from my Springdale Farm Community
Supported Agriculture (CSA) share.
Getting a box of more produce than one can reasonably use in a week
before the next box comes along, and also finding ways to prepare, and learning
to eat some vegetables I normally would not buy, can be challenging. So I am blanching and freezing some
things, preparing whole meals ahead, freezing those, and investigating new
recipes. It can be exhausting,
even for me, who generally likes to cook.
In my memoir, “God Never Hurries, I wrote: “Cooking is sometimes
soothing ritual for me.”
While preparing stuffed peppers for the freezer I listened
to Krista Tippetts’ On-Being guest, Chef Dan Barber, who extolled the
many blessings of cooking locally grown food from great taste, to real nutrition,
to environmental sensitivity and feeling a connection to the land of which we
are a part. I understand the good
sense he made but admittedly was surprised by his optimism when he said the
movement to eat locally is just getting started. In the future, people will demand more health from the foods
they eat. I hope he’s right. And I am wondering, how different would
our world be if everyone had the opportunity to eat nutritious food? Healthy food is medicine for the body,
mind and soul with wonderful long-tem side effects. Sadly, the evidence for not eating well is all around us.
But I found it very hard to stay in the kitchen this
weekend with fresh sun bright air outside and a bike trail beckoning. So I took a long break from my cooking
and a long ride. When I get on my
bike its like subtracting twenty years off my age for I can bike much more
easily than I can walk. Dusk is my
usual time to ride when I finally put an end to the days work and few others
are on the trail. On this sunny
Sunday afternoon there were many people out riding. I felt to be in good company when bikers, looking close to
me in age, zoomed past. I rode the
trail to the new park in Port Washington that juts out into Lake Michigan where
white boats of many different sizes and shapes moved in and out of the deep
blue harbor. There I lay down on a
picnic table to dangle my legs to stretch the muscles I would need for the
upgrade and headwind I would face riding home. I was soothed by the wind-rustled leaves in the young tree
above me that was back dropped by a bright blue, near cloudless sky.
The ride home was much more work than I imaged it would be. But after changing into dry clothes,
and a brief rest with more stretching, I was back in the kitchen invigorated
and ready to cook some more. It
occurred to me that even though cooking and biking can sometimes be very hard
work, most worthwhile things are.
Chef Dan Barber said, “Cooking is a contribution to the betterment of
the world.”
What if we could all cook and bike our way into a better world and a better us?
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